'Pig-killing day' by David Szalay

This is it. Today we present you a massive special episode full of wisdom, which answers your final pressing questions. Listeners wrote in from around the world — from Perth to Virginia to Prague — asking about music, cooking, careers, home, fashion and how to live a good life. L ... Show More

It’s a time-honored tradition: for the third year in a row, FT Weekend editor-at-large Matt Vella joins Lilah to reflect on this past year, and muse on the coming one. We’ve asked listeners to send their predictions and wishes for 2025, and today we’re talking through them! Will ... Show More

Today we are bringing you a winter survival guide, full of deceptively small tips that will make winter unmeasurably better. How do we best appreciate these cold, dark months? How do we stay stimulated, but also reject the grind? Our FT Weekend Magazine’s resident “winter goddess ... Show More

David Brooks is one of America’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Par ... Show More

Why is David Remnick always so cold? He’s surrounded by drafts. Editor of The New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Remnick joins us this week to discuss penne pasta, drunk tweeting, feeding the recycling bin, and Leonard Cohen. Theres some other good stuff in their ... Show More

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Skye C. Cleary to discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘lost’ novel, ‘The Inseparables’, published almost seventy years after it was written; Anna Picard reviews a very dark production of ‘Rigoletto’ at the Royal Opera House; plus, ... Show More

What does it mean to live a long and happy life? David Von Drehle has spent 40 years covering big stories and important figures as an award-winning journalist. But the best lessons turned out to be right next door. David’s latest book, “The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remark ... Show More

“We are conditioned to believe that art is safe,” Sam Anderson, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, explained in this week’s The Sunday Read. “Destruction happens in a number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of speeds — and it will happen, and no amou ... Show More

This week David talks to the novelist Zadie Smith about Charles Dickens: what he means to her, why we still read him, and what’s missing from the Dickensian view of the world. It’s a conversation about other writers as well – Turgenev, George Orwell and Toni Morrison – and about ... Show More

Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling ... Show More

Will Storr is a former journalist and author. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is "The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It." www.thescienceofstorytelling.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices 

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors This week, from 2021: In 2019, the body of a man fell from a passenger plane into a garden in south London. Who was he? by Sirin Kale. Help sup ... Show More

This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that c ... Show More